Cowboy Poetry The Decline Of The Critic Lil Wayne S Boring Prison Memoir And More The Week In Music Writing

Lil Wayne wrote a really boring prison diary—which turns out to be a fitting expose´ of the injustices of Rikers Island Last October, Lil Wayne published a memoir of his imprisonment at the infamous Rikers Island. Jarrod Shanahan writes for The New Inquiry that it’s often irredeemably boring—and as a result, it’s also the perfect embodiment of the dehumanizing practices of Rikers. [The New Inquiry]

Trap music has brought Atlanta onto the global stage, but the city’s relationship with its biggest cultural export remains tense Trap music has overrun the charts and brought Atlanta to the forefront of the global pop-music conversation—but how do the politics, economics, and social circumstances of America’s “black mecca” interact with the genre’s success? [NPR Music]